This is Ethereum’s saving grace and the reason why 2nd layers don’t crash

Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchain networks, but it also faces major challenges. One of the biggest problems was that when the network became busy, it also led to higher transaction costs on the second layers (Layer 2’s or L2’s).

Fortunately, there is now a solution: blobs.

Blobs were introduced during the Dencun upgrade on March 13, 2024. This is a new way of storing data that makes rollups cheaper and more efficient.

Rollups are a technique to scale Ethereum by merging transactions and processing them in one go. But what makes blobs so special?

What are blobs?

Blobs are a new type of data structure proposed in EIP-4844also known as “Proto-danksharding”. EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal, the process by which developers propose improvements to Ethereum.

Proto-danksharding is a precursor to full danksharding, and introduces blobs as a first step towards this major update.

Danksharding is seen as the last major step in making Ethereum truly scalable. This move will make transactions faster and cheaper. Proto-dankhardening, and thus blobs, reduces the risks of such major changes by introducing them gradually.

How do blobs work?

Before the introduction of blobs, a second layer had to bundle its transactions and send them to Ethereum for verification. However, this data remained permanently on the Ethereum blockchain, leading to “state bloat” – a congestion of the network.

With blobs, data is sent in a large data object, called a blob. Each blob can contain up to 75 MB of data. After verification, the data in the blob can be deleted, so there is no permanent load on the blockchain.

Why are blobs important?

Blobs take the pressure off Ethereum and make rollups faster and cheaper. Because data can be deleted after verification, there is less state bloat on the Ethereum main chain.

Additionally, blobs operate in a separate market for blob gas, separate from the regular gas market on Ethereum. As a result, congestion on Ethereum does not affect the cost of blobs. This is very important, because in the past, everyone was competing with each other for gas.

For the newcomer, this isn’t really about gas. Gas in this case is the unit of account for the amount of computing power required to process your transaction.

For L2 users and developers, this means lower costs and faster transactions. It becomes cheaper to run complex smart contracts and products, making L2s more attractive and profitable.

Thanks to blobs, we no longer have to worry about high costs due to congestion on the Ethereum network. This makes Ethereum and its second layers more robust and efficient, which is a big step forward for the future-proofing of this crypto project.